European Refugee Crisis in the 21st Century
Data Source
Introduction
“Refugee” is still one of the most common words we hear in geopolitical news, even though we are living in a relatively peaceful era. When watching the news about refugees, people are often struck by the sadness that refugees have lost their homelands and the pain that they suffer as they search for asylum. However, only a few people think about the stress that the countries providing asylum are under. In a gesture of humanity, many European countries have generously opened their doors and provided asylum for refugees from all over the world. In 2015, more than 1.3 million refugees came to the continent to request asylum, which was the most since World War II. Not only is there financial pressure, but the differences in terms of culture and religion between refugees and local residents also present challenges for the governments of European countries. Additionally, the situations of refugees from conflicts in Europe, such as Ukraine and the Balkans, who also face similar struggles, have been largely ignored, as they are often seen as being from “first-world” countries.
In this project, we will be focusing on two groups of refugees in 21st-century Europe. The first group consists of refugees looking for asylums in Europe, and the second group comprises refugees from European countries who have settled all over the world. Our analysis will include an overview of the origin countries and asylum countries of the refugees, as well as demographic data such as age and gender. We will also investigate the application and approval rates of the refugees seeking asylum in Europe. As the factors determining the ability to accept refugees, we will examine the relationship between the number of accepted refugees and GDP, population, and income level of European countries. Furthermore, we will concentrate on the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia.
Data Description
In this project, we mainly use the refugee population data set, which displays the number of refugees, according to UNHCR, from countries all over the world since 1951.
This data set presents the movement of refugees from one country to another and provides information about the types of refugees involved. To make it clear for comprehension, the table above is only a part of the data, which contains the ISO code of origin country and asylum country, the total number of corresponding refugees, and the origin and asylum continent. Besides, the dataset encompasses the years 1951 to 2022, offering a comprehensive perspective on refugee displacement. However, since there are too many rows within this data, the table above only shows partial data from year 2021.
1. Global and European Refugee Flow
First of all, let’s have a look at the refugee flow within past two decades.
Note
A sankey diagram is known as a visualization utilized to present a flow from one set of values to another, which is often applied to visual analysis of energy, material composition and financial data. In this project, we innovatively used sankey plots to vividly visualize the flow of refugees within past two decades.
This plot above shows the global refugee movement in the 21st century at the continent level. Every link in this plot represents for a group of refugees moving from the continent at the left end, seeking for asylum in the continent at the right end.
According to this sankey plot of, we can clearly observe that Africa, Asia and Europe have had the highest number of refugee inflows and outflows in past 20 years. We can notice an interesting fact that the vast majority of refugees in Asia and Africa just relocated within their respective continents. However, the situation is different in Europe, where more than half of refugees who moved to this continent Europe came from other regions. Therefore, although the absolute number of refugees in Asia and Africa are much larger than that of Europe, it is even more valuable to study the refugees moving towards or from Europe when we want to analyze the intercontinental refugee movement. Taking into consideration for both high proportion of refugees arriving from other continents and recent local conflicts in Europe that may cause significant fluctuation of refugee movement, this project will mainly focus on European refugee issue in subsequent sections.
Unlike the former plot of global refugee flows, this graph only display refugees moving from or to Europe since 2002. From this plot, we notice that most of refugees that came from Europe move to other European countries and a small proportion of refugees move to North America. Few refugees from Europe moved to regions other than these two continents. As for the refugees moved to Europe, almost half are from Asia, followed by Europe and Africa.
2. Origin and Asylum Countries of Refugees in Europe
By looking at the choropleth map, we can see that at the beginning of the 21st century, the origin of refugees seeking asylum in Europe was mainly from three areas: the Middle East, Ukraine, and the Balkans. The major reason behind the large number of refugees in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, was the Iraq War, which started in 2003 when the US-led invasion was carried out. The invasion was prompted by allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and greatly affected the conditions in the Middle East area. The conflicts in the Balkans during the early 21st century were a series of ethnic and political disputes that emerged after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. These conflicts resulted in violence and instability in the region, leading to millions of refugees. After 2012, Syria and Ukraine became the main origin countries of refugees. In terms of European asylum, Germany has become the leader of the continent since the early 21st century, and France began accepting more refugees after 2012. Many Ukrainian refugees moved to Russia, which was the opponent in the conflict.
Now we’ll move on to find the situation of the refugees in Europe. We know that Europe is one of, if not the most developed continent. Many European countries are rich and stable enough to hold asylums for refugees, especially when there are so many serious wars, diseases and other bad things happening all over the world.
Therefore, this part focus on answering some questions: what are the countries that have the most refugees escaped to Europe? What European countries took care of the most refugees? What are these situations like during different times of this century?
Countries that have most refugees escaped to Europe are Middle East countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Ukraine. Refugees from Syria and other Middle East countries were gradually increasing since 2015 and reached 40000 per year, due to the war and unstable situations in the area. Reguees from Ukraine had a major increase in 2022 only, from almost zero to nearly 140000, obviously caused by the Russia-Ukraine war happened in 2022.
Out of the European countries who offer asylum to refugees from all over the war, Germany is the country with most refugees accepted, and the number is higher than other countries almost every year. Therefore, not only Germany os wealthy and stable enough, policies about refugees are also always generous in this country. It is followed by France and Poland, where the number of refugees escaped to Poland had an explosive growth in 2022 alone. Having the same situation in the last chart, and also being neighboring countries, it is obvious that Poland offered asylumn to a large part of Ukrainian refugees in 2022.
3. Demographic Infomation of Refugees in Europe
Note
While the data is complete for the total number of people seeking asylum, some rows do not provide separate totals for male and female refugees. In these cases, the Male total adds Female total may not add up to the Total number of refugees.
Over time, the total number of people seeking asylum abroad has been steadily increasing. The proportion of male and female asylum seekers is roughly equal in most countries. If the center of the circle is above the dashed line, it represents a higher number of male asylum seekers compared to females, and if the center of the circle is below the dashed line, it represents a higher number of female asylum seekers compared to males. Focusing on Europe, it can be observed that before 2019, the total number of asylum seekers in the region remained relatively stable with minimal year-to-year changes. However, after 2020, there was a significant surge in the number of people seeking asylum in Europe.
This increase can be partly attributed to the escalation of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Thousands of civilians were displaced as the war intensified, leading many to seek refuge in neighboring European countries. The ongoing conflict has led to widespread devastation and suffering, driving an increasing number of individuals and families to seek safety and stability outside their home countries. The situation has pressured European nations to accommodate and support the growing number of asylum seekers fleeing the region’s turmoil.
4. Approval Rate of European Asylum Application
In this plot, Africa and Asia display slightly higher median approval rates of 0.523 and 0.540, respectively. In contrast, Europe’s median approval rate is 0.465, with values ranging from 0.406 to 0.601. North America and South America exhibit similar median rates at 0.509 and 0.465, respectively. Oceania has the lowest median approval rate of 0.384, as well as the lowest minimum approval rate of 0.246. Although Europe’s median approval rate for asylum applications is not the highest among the continents, the approval rates are more clustered than in other continents.
5. European Countries’ Ability to Receive Refugees
In this plot, we can observe strong relationships between the number of accepted refugees and a country’s GDP, population, and income level. Countries with higher GDP, population, and income level are more likely to accept a larger number of refugees from all over the world. For example, as two of the wealthiest countries with large populations in Europe, Germany and France have accepted a significant number of refugees in the 21st century. However, the UK has accepted far fewer refugees than countries of comparable size. Smaller countries such as Sweden and Austria have accepted more refugees than the UK. Some middle-income countries such as Russia and Serbia have also accepted many refugees during conflicts. One thing to note is that the data for 2022 is not available because the GDP and population data for some countries are missing.
6. Specific Conflict Study: Conflict between Russia and Ukraine (2014 - 2022)
According to the sunburst plot, from 2014 to 2022, 75% of the refugees from Ukraine are settled in Russia, Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Only about 1% of refugees settled outside Europe, even though Ukraine is relatively close to Asian countries. In this case, we found that even though European countries have accepted a large portion of refugees from other continents, most Ukrainian refugees found shelter in Europe rather than other continents, which made the refugee crisis in Europe worse off. Ukraine is not far from Central Asia and East Asia, but why did they not seek asylum in Asia? One reason is that Ukraine is a middle-income country, and the income level in most Central Asian countries is much lower than in Ukraine. The second reason is that many Asian countries, such as China, do not accept any refugees. Another interesting observation is that more than one-third of the refugees from Ukraine seeking asylum settled in Russia, which is the cause of the deadly conflict. The reason for such a paradox is that Russia has the most significant minority in eastern Ukraine, so when the war began in eastern Ukraine, many residents went to Russia to avoid the flames of war.
Even though the conflict between Russia and Ukraine started in 2014, most refugees are forced to leave their homes and seek new asylum in 2022. That is because tensions between Russia and Ukraine grew after the former took Crimea in 2014, and throughout the years, various peace talks and ceasefire agreements have been held. However, the situation in the region remains volatile. In 2022, Russian troops crossed Ukraine’s border. This led to the largest conflicts in eastern Ukraine since Crimea was occupied by Russia in 2014. Also, most of the refugees chose Russia, Poland, Germany, and Czech as the asylum.
Conclusion
In retrospect, more than half of refugees who moved to Europe came from other continents, especially from Asia. As for the refugees originated from Europe, most of them just moved to other European countries and a small proportion sought for asylum in North America. One of the reasons is that refugees from Asia, Africa, and North America are more likely to be approved to stay in Europe than those from Europe itself. Specifically, the major sources of refugees seeking asylum in Europe were the Middle East, Ukraine, and the Balkans. Since 2012, Syria and Ukraine have become the main origin countries. Especially in 2022, the number of refugees has increased dramatically because of the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. Many Ukraine refugees have chosen Europe as their destination, especially Russia due to ethnic reasons. Large European countries with larger GDP and population, such as Germany, are better able to receive more refugees. However, the UK, unlike other larger European countries with similar income level and population, has been accepting fewer refugees than expected. Additionally, in most countries, the proportion of male and female asylum seekers is roughly equal.
The main takeaway from our project on the European refugee crisis is that most European refugees have settled within the continent, while more than half of the refugees received by Europe have come from other continents, exacerbating the refugee crisis. However, preventing refugees from seeking asylum in Europe is not a solution to this dilemma. The only way to alleviate the refugee crisis is by effectively addressing the underlying problems that force people to flee their homelands, such as geopolitical and religious conflicts, as well as poverty. This could involve working with international organizations, governments, and civil society to provide humanitarian aid, promote peace and stability, and foster economic development in regions affected by the crisis. By taking such actions, we can help create conditions that allow refugees to return to their homes and rebuild their lives, reducing the need for them to seek asylum in other countries.